Classical Islamic Political Philosophy
The falsafa tradition of al-Farabi, Avicenna and Averroes, which read Plato and Aristotle on the virtuous city and transmitted them — through Maimonides and the Latin translators — into the Scholastic mainstream.
Descends from
- Aristotelianism4th century BC, revived repeatedly
Falsafa is Aristotle read in Arabic. Averroes wrote commentaries so thorough that Latin readers called him simply the Commentator.
Gave rise to
- Modern Islamic Political Thought20th century to present
Modern Islamism claims the classical tradition's authority while rejecting its philosophical method, arguing from revelation and law where falsafa argued from reason and nature.
- Scholasticism12th-15th century
The Latin Averroes reshaped the thirteenth-century schools: Aquinas wrote against him by name, which is the surest sign of how much had to be answered.
Averroes
1126–1198
Averroes was the Andalusian philosopher whose commentaries carried Aristotle back into the Latin West, and whose insistence that philosophy and revelation could not contradict each other set the terms of the medieval argument about reason.
ThinkerAvicenna
980–1037
Avicenna was the Persian philosopher and physician whose systematic reworking of Aristotle gave the Latin scholastics their vocabulary for being, essence and existence — the metaphysical apparatus Aquinas built on.
ThinkerAl-Ghazali
1058–1111
The jurist who dismantled the philosophers' claim to demonstrative certainty, provoked Averroes's reply, and reset the relation between reason and revelation in Islam.
ThinkerAl-Farabi
872–950
The Second Teacher, who fused Plato's political philosophy with Aristotelian logic and Islamic prophecy, and set the framework every later Islamic and Jewish philosopher worked within.